Values and the Poems of Marianne Moore

1969 ◽  
Vol 58 (4) ◽  
pp. 516
Author(s):  
Constance H. Edsall ◽  
Marianne Moore
Keyword(s):  
2010 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-241
Author(s):  
E. Levy
Keyword(s):  

1971 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 602
Author(s):  
Roy Harvey Pearce ◽  
George W. Nitchie
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Jesse Zuba

This chapter explores representations of career in Harmonium (Wallace Stevens), Observations (Marianne Moore), and White Buildings (Hart Crane) that resist the normative course of development that underpins the professional ideal of regular production. The indeterminacy of representations of career in nineteenth-century poetry is pressed to an extreme in modernist debuts, which are burdened not only with evoking the uncertainty that confirms vocational integrity and the intermittency that signals autonomy from the market, but also with evoking those ideas in new ways. This last challenge, necessitated by the demand that every artistic generation make it new, is made still more daunting by the rise of a culture of professionalism in which writing poetry was apt to appear as childish, effeminate, escapist, elitist, and generally absurd.


2021 ◽  
pp. 67-92
Author(s):  
Rachel Trousdale

Marianne Moore treats humor as a way to recognize what we have in common with others and to create understanding across difference. In her early work, Moore experiments with combinations of satire and empathy. In “A Prize Bird” and “The Wood-Weasel,” she uses humor as a test of friendship, and suggests that sympathetic laughter constitutes a distinctively American approach to collaborative artistic creation. Humor in “The Pangolin,” like the artists’ tools Moore discusses in the poem, is an end in itself and a way to discover new possibilities: it marks shared humanity and unites the human with the divine. Moore’s laughter occurs when we understand intuitively what it is like to be someone else; the more apparently unlike us the other, the more satisfying the laughter. Throughout Moore’s work, humor can be read as an ars poetica, modeling the synthesis of diverse components that she performs in her poetry.


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